Archive for October, 2007
I just got my own radio show!
The first “Empty Space” will broadcast on Sheffield Live next Tuesday from 10am until noon (GMT). It will continue every week, either in that slot or at the same time on Friday.
You can listen live at www.sheffieldlive.org - where every show will also be archived as an MP3/podcast - or if you live within a few miles of Sheffield city centre then you can tune your radio to 93.2FM.
The show will be about contemporary visual and audio arts. I’ll have features and interviews on Sheffield events and artists, interspersed with eclectic and experiMental music. I’ll also be working with artists to create some one-off made-for-radio artworks.
If you’re near a computer when the show’s on, please visit the Sheffield Live chat room, where I’ll be hanging out and taking feedback and suggestions.
After (or even during) the show, I’ll be posting track-listings and details of events to FAD, the arts magazine website which I co-edit.
I’m very open to suggestions for features, guests, music, happenings - anything which might work on the airwaves, but which doesn’t usually get an airing.
Please listen and enjoy!
Over a Stuck Between Stations there’s a great compilation of all those terrible music videos which you just can’t get out of your head. And, yes, Nimoy is there: “drawing a parallel between Hobbit and Vulcan strap-on ears was a gesture of fantasy brilliance”.
Just after I took this photo, the green guy in the underwear and the sandals came up to me and said "what are you taking photos for, paedophile?"
He then started to pull his boxer shorts down and say "photograph this, paedophile!"
People, eh?
Apologies for the slightly drab look around here. Just upgraded WordPress (from 2.0.4 to 2.3, in case you’re interested - quite a big leap). Everything looked fine, but there were a few small niggles. So I had to upgrade K2 as well. That’s when it all started going a bit screwy. I must have made lots of customisations to the theme last time I fiddled with my blog layout, so now I have to reverse-engineer all of them. Well… not now. When I find time. Meanwhile, please bear with me.
Anyone who knows me knows my beards. Until my wedding day (on 1/2/3 - or 2/1/3 if you’re American) I went clean-shaven for most of my life. But on that happy day, I got best-man Ed to carve something new in my face, inspired by my new Paul Smith suit complete with thigh-length drape jacket.
Ever since then, I’ve kept some variation on the same theme. Since Gill and I never did get around to exchanging rings (and since Ed had promised to make us wedding rings), I guess you could say that my facial hair is my wedding ring (NB: the same doesn’t apply to Gill). It has evolved since then though: through subtle changes in facial anatomy and less subtle rescue jobs on shaving cock-ups, it has crept around my face, grown thicker and thinner, stripes have changed position, angle and number. A few months ago at Razor Stiletto I had my face painted, tiger-style, with a couple of beard-stripes doubling up as tiger-patterning. When I got home, I thought I’d take the similarity further (forgetting that I had done something very similar exactly two years earlier).
Going tiger-striped seems to have inspired me to new shaving confidence, and to trust my facial hair to find its own shape. Shaving has now become an almost meditative activity, a sort of automatic-drawing but with a sharp implement, where I allow the contours of my face and the movement of my razor to conjure up new patterns of their own, with little conscious intervention from me. As a result, things have got sort of… well, fancy.
Here’s the latest result:
For the first few days after it shaved itself, I couldn’t help thinking that the design was somehow familiar. I was sure I’d seen it somewhere before. Then it struck me: it looked just like the logo for 70s French operatic prog-rock band Magma. OK, so it actually looks quite different now that I’ve seen the original again, but it was close enough to jog my memory.
Any suggestions as to which prog heroes’ logo I should carve into my chin next? Hmmm, carve into my chin… [thinks]… my face could become like some sort of prog-rock Mount Rushmore.
iTunes drives me mad.
It seems there’s hardly a day goes by without that Apple software update app popping up and ruining it for me. And of course, every time I update iTunes I then have to delete the now inoperative shortcut icon from my quick links bar (why they can’t stick the new version in the same location, like virtually every other bit of Windows software, is beyond me), I have to agree to another set of Apple T&Cs, and I have to wait while the new version “scans” my music library. Ah well, it could be worse: at least they seem to have given up on the habit of re-installing that utterly useless Quicktime system tray app, which I used to have to uninstall every time around the merry-go-round.
I’m not even sure what it is that I’m getting with these never-ending updates: I haven’t noticed any useful improvements in the last year or so. I can only assume that the updates just bolt on new ways for Apple to make money out of the iTunes store, which I never use.
I’ve finally taken the only sane route and disabled iTunes auto-updates, although it annoys me that I should be bullied into doing so.
Some time on Sunday, my email software went into meltdown. All of my emails received between Sunday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon went straight into the void. As usual, my computer was sick at the same time as I was, so it took me three days to spot this.
I’ve you’ve sent me an email recently, please re-send as I may not have got it.
There’s a great little movie on Youtube my friend and some-times collaborator Mozaz (AKA 0742, AKA Pretentious Artist, AKA….). As one friend described it “a sort of alt-Fred Dibnah”.
Filmed and edited by Dan Hart/Babydeltic.
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